Reunification therapy necessary after court’s work is completed

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Editor’s Note:  This is the second of two articles on reunification therapy for families after a custody dispute.  The first article, on child development, appeared in the March 5 edition of Minnesota Lawyer.

Custody and visitation evaluations frequently recommend reunification therapy in which parents and children undergo a process that aims to reconnect their bond and work through any issues that may have stemmed from the separation and custody dispute.

Given the potentially profound lifelong effects parental separation can have on child development and attachment, it is peculiar and disturbing that there is no standard protocol to follow when instituting reunification therapy. While the American Psychological Association and other similar bodies have begun to endorse or establish guidelines and protocols for child custody evaluations, these professional institutions have not established similar guidelines for the actual process of reunification therapy. Similarly, research has examined appropriate guidelines for child custody evaluations, but similar research regarding the therapy that may occur after the evaluation is scarce.

Several protocols for use with reunification therapy have been suggested and deserve close scrutiny. One such protocol developed by Kimberly Von Bahr, MSW, LICSWA, outlines distinct stages encountered in reunification therapy.  The first stage is assessment, which consists of the therapist identifying any barriers to reunification and gaining a deeper understanding of the issues that led to estrangement. This stage focuses primarily on meeting with the estranged parent and gathering information about the family unity. This stage will typically take 30 to 60 days.

The second stage, commitment and planning, focuses on building acceptance, an integral part to reunification. All past blaming issues are acknowledged and addressed during this stage. It is important for children at this stage to feel free to express all feelings of guilt, self-blame or abandonment. Other essential features of this stage include establishing rules and boundaries regarding contact among all involved parties, clarifying parent roles and evaluating the parenting plan. This stage typically lasts 30 to 90 days depending on case-specific variables.

One must evaluate a child’s resistance to reunification and attempt to desensitize the child to fixed decisions, certainly if another parent has coached the child. For a professional to defer to a child’s decision not to see a parent is not in that child’s best interest, particularly when there is a possibility of another parent coaching that child. It is also important to evaluate a child’s anger and ambivalence and work to help the child to express these feelings to assist the parent in good listening skills, empathy, acceptance and the ability to apologize.

Integration is the final stage in this model. In this stage, visitation begins, starting with phone contact and progressing toward supervised visits and eventually unsupervised contact. This stage is tailored to deploy a wide variety of visitation procedure and process options. Visitation may consist of only phone contact until the child is 18; it may eventually include unsupervised visits with the estranged parent becoming an active part of parenting for the child.  The options are endless because they depend on such factors as the number of children, the ages of the children, the physical distance between the parents’ homes, the duration of the separation, and the degree of parent and child pathology, to name just a few. This stage typically can be expected to last 60 to 120 days.

Reunification therapy is a frequent outcome of child custody evaluations and can have profound effects on child development and attachment. Parental separation can lead to insecure parent-child attachment, which increases the child’s risk of experiencing maladaptive attachment in future relationships and developing potentially serious psychopathology. Thus, reunification therapy is clearly a useful and needed service, and the need for an empirically studied and validated protocol for carrying it out is clear.  While relevant professional bodies have begun to establish guidelines for custody evaluators in family court, the time has come for these same professional bodies to establish reunification therapy guidelines for practitioners working with these families after the court has finished its work.

Dr. Paul M. Reitman Ph.D. L.P. F.A.C.F.E. is in private practice seeing patients both on an inpatient basis at three local hospitals and seeing patients in an outpatient clinic. He is the president of Psychological Consultants of Southern Minnesota since 1981.

Adam Gierok is a research assistant and doctoral student at Argosy University–Twin Cities.